My one and half seconds comment was a bit facetious and could better have read “shitloads”, which is just to say; he was a good chunk faster than usual vs the competition and his teammate, and was putting the Williams in the company of cars it had not been anywhere near all season, nor at the race after.

Bob Fernley has said they have the same Quali modes as the Mercedes team, but you don’t know what you don’t have. Ferrari have openly said in previous years that while the engine in the back of a Sauber is a homologated unit, the maps are different. I didn’t think it was so controversial that teams have different maps made available, for a variety of reasons.

Lotus had the famous example a few years back of his Grosjean suddenly having the burners lit mid-race at Spa so as to nick a place from Vettel.

Paul Carney:
There once was a team boss from Woking
Whose F1 car always was smoking
He thought there a chance
With an engine from France
But the car doesn’t seem to stop croaking

McLaren have been able to blame everything on Honda for the past few years, but looking at what is going on with them and Torro Rosso in Barcelona suggests it has all been a convenient way of hiding other issues

Mercedes were, and I still believe are, entirely fair with their engine modes etc. The reason that the Merc would have a bit more power is through a better optimised installation for cooling etc.

I can’t comment on Ferrari other than their public comments that all teams have the same modes etc.

I don’t remember the Lotus Grosjean example. Are you saying that for a few laps he had a lot more power? Was this with the old V8s? Delivering a lot more power for a few laps is pretty difficult. If you can let me know exactly when I will see if there is any data to substantiate it or not.

Mercedes started to develop the hybrid powerplant as soon as the rules were announced. They invested more in this process than any other supplier. In parallel at Merc F1 we had developed some leading edge simulation tools and were using those with Mercedes High Performance Powerplants to develop the new hybrid system, fully integrated as part of the chassis.

This process was extremely likely to deliver the best powerplant and the best integrated system in the Merc car. And that has continued all the way through the hybrid era.

With all other teams who installed the Merc hybrid system having to second guess why things were done and not having the same chassis, would have to make further compromises, which in the end would affect vehicle performance directly or indirectly.

This is really why if you are not a works team, it is going to be much more difficult to beat a works team with that specific powerplant. Renault are of course going to show that it is possible with RBR and possibly McLaren beating them this year!

Could be that he was heavily into fuel saving and then was told to use qualifying mode. The different modes can have different laptimes of at least 1.5 seconds. But to reiterate my previous point. All teams using that engine have access to those modes. They can choose to use them whenever they want, within the Merc operating limits so that they do not destroy the engine (looks bad on TV for Merc!).